- guardian.co.uk, Saturday June 17 2000 02.53 BST
Copeland, 24, revealed his desire to psychiatrist Ian Cumming and told him that he harboured thoughts of killing his schoolmates.
Dr Cumming visited Copeland in Broadmoor secure hospital, Berkshire, on May 22 - two weeks before his trial started.
"He still feels the need to do it," Dr Cumming said. He added that Copeland felt "very driven, like a robot" to produce bombs. The need to do it was overwhelming - even after his picture was published by police.
"Rather than escape, he felt he had to place a bomb," said the doctor who first saw Copeland in Belmarsh prison, south London, where he oversees mental health.
Dr Cumming said Copeland was paranoid schizophrenic and had probably been progressively deteriorating over two years.
Copeland has admitted three bomb outrages in Brixton, Spitalfields, and Soho, London, in April last year in which three people died and 129 were injured. He is being tried for murder after the prosecution refused to accept his guilty pleas to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
Dr Cumming said Copeland, of Cove, Farnborough, Hampshire, found homosexuals a threat and sometimes carried a weapon to protect himself.
He thought he would go to a gay bar, pick up a man and kill him, said the doctor. He had come "within a few feet" of killing a man he had targeted.
He became interested in fascism in his late teens, and a few months before the offences contacted the Christian Identity Movement, an American church group which interpreted the Bible in a racist way.
He decided to become a "lone wolf" because other far right groups could not be trusted, Copeland told the psychiatrist.
Dr Cumming said Copeland exhibited signs of mental illness when he first examined him within a week of his arrest.
He felt he was a messenger from God and later said the world would end during the millennium, heralding terror and the second coming of Christ.
Dr Cumming said Copeland had not liked Broadmoor when he was transferred there and tried to get himself sent back to Belmarsh.
Another psychiatrist, Paul Gilluley, said Copeland had denied being mentally ill. He had said Broadmoor was the "living dead" and he would "rather die quickly than suffer over a long period of time".
The hearing continues.
